Israel's self-fulfilling prophecy moved one step closer to its tragic conclusion last month as its façade of normalcy slipped and the world glimpsed the true nature of the Zionist project in the Middle East. The massacre of innocents aboard the Mavi Marmara has galvanised global citizens to end the Siege of Gaza once and for all. But Israel's lunacy is altogether more dangerous following the UN's official acknowledgment that Israel is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Its willingness to use them "by way of deception" strengthens the likelihood of a false-flag nuclear attack being carried out to avenge humanity's non-existent "victimisation" of the "Light unto the Nations."

We will examine the latest ridiculous case of "homegrown terrorism" in the US which took place on the eve of momentous discussions on nuclear disarmament in New York City, as well as the framing of North Korea for the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan. Was Israel involved in both events? The hysteria these two attacks generated as well as their timing certainly indicates that somebody is blowing smoke to distract people from moves on the grand chessboard. The clownish Times Square car bomb was not the real terrorist act in New York last month. Financial terrorists held the US government hostage until it reversed its decision to break up organised crime on Wall Street. Is the eurozone debt crisis similarly contrived?

The devastation in the Gulf of Mexico is more than Obama's "Hurricane Katrina." It is a crime against Nature that could easily have been averted. The Earth will continue to bleed oil until enough people wake up from their slumber. The methane gas explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is another wake-up call to the dangers of our pervasive and persistent wishful thinking about the world around us, our role in it and the consequences of giving away our power to those least capable of using it responsibly. At the same time, Nature plays its part as the planet continues to open up and methane bubbles up to the surface. There were at least three volcanic eruptions in May which dwarfed last month's hyped performance from Eyjafjallajokull. Many more have been placed on 'alert' status.

Major events of global significance are taking place on an almost daily basis now. While some could be considered "natural events", reflecting back to us the chaotic state of our world, others are willfully perpetrated to intensify chaos and distract attention from the desperate maneuvers of our intra-species predator to retain control of an environment that is rapidly changing. No deed is too abhorrent for them to purposely commit, no lie too big for them to utter. The people of Thailand may have lost the battle against its pathocratic government, but their struggle for justice against the forces of fascism is mirrored in the wave of righteous anger demonstrated by Greeks who will not submit quietly to the diktats of the faceless financial terrorists, as well as the shock-waves of revulsion at Israel's barbarity that reverberated around the world.

The flotilla that set sail for Gaza from Greece, Turkey and Ireland last week was the latest, biggest attempt to break the siege of Gaza and sound the alarm over Israel's impending genocide of Palestinians. The successful ventures in 2008 came to a halt when the Israeli Navy rammed the Dignity on the eve of Operation Cast Lead. The boat barely made it to port in Lebanon. Aboard were Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and Green Party US Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney, along with Members of the European Parliament and volunteers. If Israel had no compunction about murdering such dignitaries in international waters, what chance the next sea attempt to break the siege of Gaza wouldn't meet a similarly violent fate?

The months of dedicated preparation that went into making this mission possible is testimony to the courage and conscientiousness of those few willing to lead by example. In many ways breaking the siege of Gaza is really about breaking the siege of man's mind. The shock and revulsion Israel's slaughter at sea has generated the world over gives us hope that small persistent efforts can ripple outwards in unexpected ways.

One of the SOTT editors met the skipper of one of the boats at a town hall meeting. The sailor gave an account of the Free Gaza movement's earlier voyages to the open-air prison. What he saw there shook him to the core and he vowed to return with a cargo ship of building materials and essential medical equipment for Gaza's homeless, dying population.

Your SOTT editor was skeptical about the success of such a mission. Even if the volunteers could succeed in raising the funds to somehow acquire a cargo ship and fill it with thousands of tonnes of needed supplies, he pointed out that the Israelis simply would not let that ship near Gaza. The captain and his crew were aware of what they were up against after the experience with the Dignity and then the Spirit of Humanity, when they were abducted by the Israeli navy and imprisoned for a week in June 2009. This was something they decided they must do. If they couldn't physically break the siege, they could at least bring the world's attention to the crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Gaza. Networking with other grassroots movements throughout the world they found the support they needed. With a little help from the Universe (in the form of a successful bid for an impounded cargo ship at a discount price) they had their vessel and their cargo. Inspired by their efforts, other groups in the US, Turkey, Sweden and Greece enlisted and by April a flotilla of 8 boats carrying over 700 volunteers, journalists and dignitaries from the US to Malaysia and from Norway to South Africa, was ready for a joint aid mission to Gaza.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised at Israel's behaviour. After all, they did actually threaten to send out "half" their Navy to stop the flotilla. Among the heroes of the Freedom Flotilla was American Joe Meadors. This was the second time he has been attacked by the Israelis at sea. 43 years ago he was part of the crew on the USS Liberty, a US Navy electronic intelligence-gathering ship that was attacked by Israeli jets and torpedo boats during the Six Day War in 1967, one of Israel's countless wars of aggression. Thirty-four Americans were killed and more than 170 were wounded in the attack. His government tried to forget this notorious incident, but Joe never forgot. Israel's deceitful misinformation campaign in the week running up to the slaughter saw its foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman tell the Israeli press that "Israel will not allow a violation of its sovereignty at sea" and that there is "no humanitarian crisis in Gaza" because of course Israel conducts itself impeccably there. Later that night, Israeli air raids bombed Gaza's airport and completely destroyed a mosque on the night of May 26. Israelis were treated to a barrage of propaganda suggesting that Gaza's inmates have never had it so good and that Turkey was now in league with its enemies who were behind this sneak attempt to "deliver weapons to Hamas." On May 27 the Israeli Navy Commander briefed his forces ahead of launching a military operation to intercept the Freedom Flotilla. Incidentally, US Chief-of-Staff Emmanuel Rahm was in Israel at this time for meetings with Psychopath-in-Chief Benjamin Netanyahu and President Psychopath Shimon Peres. Netanyahu was invited to the White House to kiss and make up following their (choreographed?) spat in March over Israel's relentless colonisation of the West Bank. We can only assume that Emmanuel was also there to give Israel the green light for what was to follow.

The Freedom Flotilla had planned to rendezvous in Cyprus and pick up more passengers before setting sail in convoy for Gaza. However, several of the vessels were sabotaged and at least two had to cancel their voyage altogether. Then the Greek Cypriot authorities reneged on their agreement with the flotilla's organisers and prevented them from entering their waters at the last minute, forcing the damaged boats to limp towards northern Cyprus where Turkish authorities permitted passenger transfers to take place. In retrospect, it's worth asking, did the Greek-Cypriot authorities know what was coming down the pike? Greek and Cypriot members of the flotilla were furious with their government's apparent betrayal, but perhaps the authorities there were anxious to wash their hands of complicity ahead of the ensuing bloodbath?

Israeli propaganda has gone into overdrive to 'legitimize' the illegitimate by claiming it couldn't be certain there were no weapons on board. The cargo of the Mavi Marmara was thoroughly checked and vetted by Turkish customs officials: there were no firearms on board and no "smuggled weapons for Hamas." Ramzi Kysia of the Free Gaza Movement explained the impeccable efforts made by the volunteers to broadcast their pure intentions:

All ships were thoroughly searched by local port authorities in Greece and Turkey prior to their departure. Additionally, the coalition hired an independent security firm to search the ships and certify that no weapons were on board. All passengers went through nonviolence training and were likewise searched for weapons prior to boarding. The Turkish government, a member-state of the NATO alliance, vetted all the Turkish passengers to insure there was no one with ties to extremist groups. These precautionary steps were deliberately taken to prevent Israeli propaganda officials from ever being able to claim that the Freedom Flotilla posed any 'security risk' to Israel.

There was a live satellite feed broadcasting the voyage from the Mavi Marmara, as well as GPS transponders showing the exact location of the flotilla at all times to anyone viewing the coalition website.

If the Israelis' account of what happened could stand on its own two feet then it would have been unnecessary for them to block all communications in the area. In the interest of transparency and goodwill the flotilla provided multiple channels of communication. The volunteers went out of their way to demonstrate that they had nothing to hide. But Israel prefers to do things in the dark. Can't have the world watching as the filthy deed is done, now can we? They 'cloaked' the area in order to ensure a 'clean slate' upon which to proffer their version of events afterwards.

Initially they said the volunteers had opened fire first. When nobody but the US bought that, they said that their commandos were only armed with "paintball guns", but that some of them were also armed with their personal handguns, two of which were swiped by the volunteers and then used against the Israeli forces (who then returned fire in "self-defense"). Perhaps sensing that the world was not buying that preposterous scenario, they dropped the issue of "who fired first" and chose to focus on the other "weapons" found on board. Photos of marbles, sling-shots, knives, bullet-proof vests (with Turkish flags emblazoned on them for good effect) and an angle-grinder were issued to the media. But the meta-data of these images revealed them to be photographs taken and doctored long before the event. The only "weapons" confirmed thus far by anyone who was present on the Mavi were sections of the ship's railings which some of the volunteers used to disarm the commandos with after many of their comrades were mowed down with automatic gunfire and left lying in a pool of blood on the ship's deck. One of the volunteers, an Irish-American and former US marine named Ken O'Keefe, still covered in blood from the beating he received at the hands of Israeli agents whilst imprisoned at the port of Ashdod, told the press upon his arrival at Istanbul's airport that some of the volunteers had indeed disarmed at least three Israeli commandos:

I said this straight to Israeli agents, probably of Mossad or Shin Bet, and I say it again now, on the morning of the attack I was directly involved in the disarming of two Israeli Commandos. This was a forcible, non-negotiable, separation of weapons from commandos who had already murdered two brothers that I had seen that day. One brother with a bullet entering dead center in his forehead, in what appeared to be an execution. I knew the commandos were murdering when I removed a 9mm pistol from one of them. I had that gun in my hands and as an ex-US Marine with training in the use of guns it was completely within my power to use that gun on the commando who may have been the murderer of one of my brothers. But that is not what I, nor any other defender of the ship did. I took that weapon away, removed the bullets, proper lead bullets, separated them from the weapon and hid the gun. I did this in the hopes that we would repel the attack and submit this weapon as evidence in a criminal trial against Israeli authorities for mass murder.

I also helped to physically separate one commando from his assault rifle, which another brother apparently threw into the sea. I and hundreds of others know the truth that makes a mockery of the brave and moral Israeli military. We had in our full possession, three completely disarmed and helpless commandos. These boys were at our mercy, they were out of reach of their fellow murderers, inside the ship and surrounded by 100 or more men. I looked into the eyes of all three of these boys and I can tell you they had the fear of God in them. They looked at us as if we were them, and I have no doubt they did not believe there was any way they would survive that day. They looked like frightened children in the face of an abusive father.

But they did not face an enemy as ruthless as they. Instead the women provided basic first aid, and ultimately they were released, battered and bruised for sure, but alive. Able to live another day. Able to feel the sun over head and the embrace of loved ones. Unlike those they murdered. Despite mourning the loss of our brothers, feeling rage towards these boys, we let them go. The Israeli prostitutes of propaganda can spew all of their disgusting bile all they wish, the commandos are the murderers, we are the defenders, and yet we fought. We fought not just for our lives, not just for our cargo, not just for the people of Palestine, we fought in the name of justice and humanity. We were right to do so, in every way.

O'Keefe's testimony is worth reading in full. The accounts from Israeli Member of the Knesset Haneen Zuabi and Al Jazeera reporter Jamal Elshayyal stand in stark contrast to Israel's lies: two Israeli warships approached the Mavi in international waters, one from each side, shortly after 4am local time on Monday 31 May. They fired tear gas and plastic-coated steel bullets onto the ship's deck. First one, then a second helicopter hovered overhead, dropping a combination of smoke bombs, gas bombs and flash bombs onto the deck, followed by live ammunition fired from machine guns, randomly sprayed on the unarmed civilians below. Then from a third helicopter commandos began abseiling down onto the deck. Some of the terrified volunteers, wondering if they would all be slaughtered at sea with nobody else around to hear their pleas for help, gang-rushed some of the descending commandos and managed to disarm at least two of them. The volunteers then took cover from more live fire and exploding flash bombs (which sound no different than a real grenade detonating). That was the 'opening round.' The terror didn't end there. Many passengers were then 'tasered' with electric shock weapons and had guns pointed at their heads as the Israeli terrorists refused medical treatment for the wounded. An Australian man was left to bleed to death and only survived thanks to his wife's first aid.

The discrepancy between the Israeli figure of 9 dead and the 20 figured by the activists may have a horrifying explanation: witnesses saw at least four of the wounded being thrown overboard, so some of the dead may have met a similar fate. Forensics of the 9 Turkish men confirmed dead have revealed that they were all shot at close range, 5 with bullet wounds to the head. Dr Haluk Ince, chair of Turkey's council of forensic medicine (ATK), said: "Approximately 20cm away was the closest. In only one case was there only one entrance wound. The other eight have multiple entrance wounds. [The man killed by a single shot] was shot just in the middle of the forehead with a distant shot." The oldest victim was 60-year-old Ibrahim Bilgen, a Turkish politician, engineer and activist who was married with six children. He had been shot once in the right temple, once in the right side of his chest, once in the back and once in the hip. The youngest was Furkan Dogan, an American citizen, shot 4 times in the head and once in the chest, apparently from close range.

Amidst the chaos volunteers picked up a death list that had apparently fallen from one of the commando's pockets. It appeared to list names and faces of those on board who were targeted for assassination. This would explain why the men were shot at close range, some of them in their beds. In a darkly logical way, it makes sense that Israel saw this as a military mission. The Press TV reporter on board has said that the first fatality was "a person that had helped the press get internet access on the ship, it was his job to help setup laptops on the ship." An Israeli soldier just walked right up to the man and shot him square between the eyes. He had to be taken out first as part of the initial stage of the operation to 'disarm' the ship's communications. Again, this suggests that the commandos had a premeditated plan to execute those selected for elimination. Michel Chossudovsky strongly suspects US intelligence was of assistance to the Israelis in this regard.

The Israeli "communications blanket" thrown over the flotilla wasn't entirely successful. An Al-Jazeera reporter managed to broadcast from the Mavi Marmara soon after Israeli Navy commandos stormed the ship in terrifying fashion. News spread of up to 20 killed and many more wounded. Why was the Mavi Marmara singled out for severe treatment? An Israeli colonel told Israeli media that "it had to be boarded because it was too big to be stopped." Although there were no fatalities on the smaller boats, returning volunteers report that stun grenades were fired on these vessels also, before commandos boarded and beat passengers senseless. Their eyes were taped, their heads hooded, arms handcuffed so tight it cut off blood circulation, then abducted to Israel where they were again beaten, made to stand in stress positions under the baking sun, stripped of their possessions and told to sign false confessions if they ever wished to see their families again. The media was not allowed to speak with the detained volunteers. Their version of events is only now emerging piecemeal as they are gradually released thanks to consistent diplomatic pressure from their home countries.

Israeli media spokesmen are even claiming links between the mythical 'al-Qaeda' and the flotilla, based on "intelligence" put forward by Danish security services, who accuse the Turkish humanitarian group IHH of "funding international terrorism." This is interesting because the Danish Security Services have long been doing dirty work for the Mossad in Europe. In The Other Side of Deception, his autobiographical sequel to By Way of Deception, former Mossad man Viktor Ostrovsky recounts his experience working on the "Danish Desk".

From what I found in the Danish secret service file, I could see that we had a "good friend" in Denmark, much friendlier and more cooperative than the Israeli Shaback was to us [Mossad]. The Danes had a small service that wanted to play in the big leagues but didn't have the know-how or financial backing to do so. On the other hand, they could gather information inside Denmark and do things that we couldn't dream of. In return for getting things done for us, we made them feel important (pp 36 - 37).

The worldwide revulsion with Israel's despicable deeds have sadly been neutralised somewhat by the deployment of its massive PR machine aka Hasbara Zionist propaganda. Until people grasp the simple truth that Israel always lies, even when it tells the truth, its lies will find space in which to anchor in normal people's minds. By withholding all information about the numbers dead or wounded, withholding access to lawyers or consular representatives, keeping the status of prisoners' condition under severe media censorship, stealing their possessions and essentially cutting them off from the outside world, Israel created a vacuum of information into which it poured its version of events via Zionist controlled media to ensure that there was no contradiction to its account in those critical first few days after the massacre.

With the help of an army of internet bots 40,000 strong equipped with 'Megaphone' spamming software and the disabling of the flotilla Twitter account, Israel was also able to marshal online coverage of the event. In a pathetic attempt to tarnish the activists with the slur of 'anti-Semitism', the Israeli government inserted fabricated audio recordings into a video of some radio communication between one of its naval vessels and the flotilla's crews. We know they were fabricated because the Israeli government admitted as much! The same video had already been released to journalists several days previously with no "Shut up, go back to Auschwitz" line in it. The added comments were so comical and puerile that we naturally wonder if the Israelis were mocking the world with this stunt. They certainly were with their next trick. An abominable music video produced by former member of the IDF and columnist for the Jerusalem Post Caroline Glick, featured the so-called "Flotilla Choir" dressed in Arab garb, mocking the world's 'overreaction' to the massacre and implying that everything the activists reported was lies. Lines such as, "There's no people dying, so the best that we can do is create the biggest bluff of all" implied that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is non-existent. They gave it the title "We Con the World" and it's set to the tune of the 1985 hit "We are the World". The Israeli Government Press Office actually posted it on its website, defiantly flipping its middle finger at the world.

Demonstrations were called by Palestinian groups throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories in response to this barbaric assault. They were met in predictable fashion. An American student lost an eye when she was shot in the head with a tear-gas canister by the IDF at a protest at the Qalandia checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah. 5 Palestinians were shot dead during protests in Gaza. Meanwhile Israelis celebrated this "victory" with counter-demonstrations at the Turkish embassy in Tel-Aviv.

Delayed by Israeli sabotage, the Irish-Malaysian team aboard the Rachel Corrie, supported by a demand from the Irish government calling on Israel to let its ship pass through the illegal Israeli blockade, bravely sailed from Malta the following weekend. It got to within 35 miles of Gaza's coastline before being intercepted and forcibly diverted to the gulag of Ashdod, its crew abducted and its cargo impounded. The media is presenting this latest act of piracy in the best light possible, describing how the situation was "peacefully resolved." You know the world is upside down when being forced to do something against your will at the barrel of a gun is considered "peaceful."

Former US Ambassador Edward Peck, who was on board one of the smaller vessels, spoke at a demonstration in front of the White House upon his return to Washington DC, and reminded Americans that "when this kind of thing happens off the coast of Somalia, we call it piracy." And yet when Israel does it, the US government says, "Israel has a right to defend itself." No prizes for guessing which country suggested that any investigation should be led by Israel when the UN Human Rights Council voted overwhelmingly to send an international team to probe the assault. Backed all the way by the US, Israel immediately dismissed the UN's statement, with the fantastical claim that 50 Turkish soldiers were "secreted away in the ships hold, heavily armed with grenades and weapons." Mark Regev, that asinine spokesman for the Israeli government, publicly thanked the US for its efforts "to water down the U.N. statement at the Security Council." What else should we expect given that every single appointee to the American government must endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community because Israel wants to make sure that no one with even a mildly independent view on Middle East affairs gets appointed to the US government or becomes a member of Congress or the Senate. The Young Turks presenter Cenk Uygur rightly highlights that this brings up important questions for Americans who think that their government works for them:

If Israel was seeking to terrorise civilians into never again sailing for Gaza, the move has backfired spectacularly. The flotilla's charities have already raised funds for sending more aid ships. A group of German Jews are planning to send a boat to Gaza in July. Tireless campaigner George Galloway has announced that a convoy by both land and sea will head for Gaza this summer. Iran has also said it is prepared to either send aid ships under military escort or protect the next civilian convoy to do so. We hope its regime is bluffing because such a move would surely lead to war.

Although it's refreshing to hear some world leaders call for an end to the siege of Gaza, politicians are ultimately hamstrung by their worship before the altar of Zionism. The people, however, are not. They are making their voices heard by way of their actions. Fresh momentum has been injected into the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to isolate Israel. Swedish dockers have announced they will blockade Israeli ships for two weeks from June 15. Rock bands are cancelling their performances in Israel (prompting the Israelis to label this "cultural terrorism"!)

Turkey has long been a regional ally to Israel, but its moves towards regional alliance with Iran and Syria since Operation Cast Lead are threatening to Israel. As a member of NATO Turkey has a strong card to play. For the moment it is calling the attack on the Freedom Flotilla "an act of piracy", but it could shift tactics and label it an act of war. This would activate Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, putting the US and European members of NATO in the awkward position of having to choose where its allegiances lie: to each other or to the racist enclave that seeks to pit the whole world against itself. The Turkish government has reduced all ties with Israel "to a minimum", cancelling joint military exercises and halting all state energy and water projects with Israel.

Given that an act of piracy on a vessel carrying its flag had just occurred in international waters, giving it jus ad bellum under the international laws of war, Turkey's measured response thus far has been admirable. Just four hours before the Freedom Flotilla was violently hijacked, a rocket attack killed 6 at a Turkish naval base in Iskenderun, close to the Syrian border. The PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group with close ties to Israeli Mossad, claimed responsibility. The day before, simultaneous attacks by PKK gunmen also left 6 security personnel dead. The Kurdish people have legitimate grievances with the Turkish government, but their 'army' has become a tool of foreign intrigue. Who else but their Israeli sponsors could have prompted the PKK to deliver Turkey these side blows at just the right time to distract its government and remind Prime Minister Erdogan that "we can strike you anytime." For his part, Erdogan sounds like a man who is finally coming to terms with the fact that Israel is not a democracy ruled by humans, but a pathocracy ruled by psychopaths, operating beyond the bounds of any moral restraint. It is imperative that Turkey does not respond in the way that Israel would like. Israel is seeking to perpetuate the cycle of terrorism in order to further its futile quest for global hegemony. He thus joins Iran's Ahmadinejad and only a handful of other world leaders prepared to highlight the poisonous mortal threat posed by this horrendous anti-social experiment of inhumanity:

Israeli-born musician and author Gilad Atzmon summed up this despicable deed as follows:

Once again it is devastatingly obvious that Israel is not trying to hide its true nature: an inhuman murderous collective fuelled by a psychosis and driven by paranoia. [...]

What we saw yesterday wasn't just a failure on the ground. It was actually an institutional failure of a morbid society that a long time ago lost touch with humanity. [...]

Israel is now officially mad and deadly. The Jewish State is not just careless about human life, as we have been following the Israeli press campaign leading to the slaughter, Israel actually seeks pleasure in inflicting pain and devastation on others.

The utterly schizoidal "Rabbinical Council of Judea and Samaria" has issued a statement saying that the global condemnation

[...] "places us at the beginning of the Gog and Magog process where the world is against us, but which ends with the third and final redemption. [...]

"The legitimacy of our people is not derived from the nations of the world and their poisonous traditions, rather from the Torah of Israel which teaches us that [Israel] 'is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.'"

This is Israel's vengeance. Vengeance against the US for betraying its nuclear secret. Vengeance against the UN for encouraging it to join the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Vengeance against the Palestinians for resisting subjugation. Vengeance against humanity for its failure to accept that there can only be one victim: Israel. What has become clear is that, in Israel, we are witnessing the effects of a severe paranoid personality disorder, writ large.

There can be no doubt now for those with eyes to see that Israel is the primary source of anti-Semitism in the world today, and endangers all Jews. Proclaiming itself the "Jewish State" but acting as a rogue state, Israel exposes all Jews to revulsion and retribution.

The murder of Gaza peace activists shows that the actual goal of Zionism is not to protect Jews from anti-Semitism but to create anti-Semitism.

The United Nations nuclear disarmament conference held in New York this month made significant progress towards multilateral agreement for securing a WMD-free Middle East by 2012, and at the very least staving off a nuclear arms race. But of course, what is implied by this language is that there actually is a "nuclear arms race", purportedly led by Iran with Israel a distant second in the culpability stakes. The truth however is that there is no "race." There is only one nation in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons. Indeed Israel has had so many nukes for so long that it could afford to sell them to Apartheid South Africa in 1975. Israel wasn't at the conference because it isn't a signatory to the UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel expects the world to somehow pretend that it doesn't have nuclear weapons so that the threat that Israeli nukes pose to the Middle East and the entire world can be plausibly denied. It is understandable that the US was reluctant to issue visas to the Iranian delegates attending the conference, given that the message they were bringing to the table was that "nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to the world," in direct contradiction to Zionist propaganda claiming that Iran is pursuing nuclear technology with which to 'smite' Israel. As thousands of people gathered outside on the streets to voice this simple vision of a world without nukes, the American hosts inside spent their energy deflecting discussion of Israel's arsenal.

The only world leader at the conference was Iran's President Ahmadinejad. To listen to the international media you would be forgiven for thinking that this 'maniac' was threatening to destroy the whole world. Let's see what the hundreds of delegates missed when they walked out the chamber in protest during his speech:

"The nuclear bomb is a fire against humanity rather than a weapon for defence," he said.

"The possession of nuclear bombs is not a source of pride; it is rather disgusting and shameful," said Ahmadinejad.

"And even more shameful is the threat to use or to use such weapons, which is not even comparable to any crime committed throughout the history," he declared.

Clearly the words of a raving lunatic then, delivered as they were in the country which possesses over 5,000 nuclear bombs. What do Israel and the US expect us to think when we hear these words? That Ahmadinejad is lying through his teeth? Perhaps they want us to believe that this is a clever ploy to lull the world into a false sense of security about Iran's intentions, all the while secretly constructing nuclear bombs with which to "wipe Israel off the map"? But it is precisely because Iran has been completely consistent in its message of world peace and nuclear disarmament that the US and Israel have worked overtime to convince us of just the opposite.

In the space of three days there were two significant leaks concerning Israel's nuclear capabilities. First the South African government leaked documents containing then Israeli Defence Minister Shimon Peres' signature for the sale of nuclear weapons to Apartheid South Africa in 1975; this was followed by the US government declassifying a "secret report" revealing its atomic dealings with Israel in the 1950s-1960s. Between 1957 and 1967 the US government supplied Israel with weapon-grade enriched uranium. So there you have it. Mordechai Vanunu has been locked away all this time as a lesson to conscientious Israelis wishing to speak out about the country's nuclear weapons program. And now it is confirmed that the US effectively donated the technology to Israel during the Eisenhower administration. How much of this was stolen (the Pollard spy case comes to mind) and how much was done clandestinely through secret deals between US and Israeli administrations remains to be seen. But as Gordon Duff writes, what is clear is that "it makes any aid America gives Israel illegal. If Israel is nuclear, which is now official, and in violation of international treaties, just as with Iraq and Iran, then America has to demand inspections and disarmament. There is no choice. This is the law." The US position as "policeman of the world" is untenable with its position funding and harboring known terrorist states.

As the past caught up with Israel, the new IAEA chief called for it to get in line and open its nuclear operations to inspections. "Never going to happen," said the US delegation to the nuclear disarmament conference. Obama promised Iran that "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist" last year. Fine words from Mr. Nobel, but what of his deeds? Groundbreaking negotiations this month on a nuclear "swap deal" between Turkey, Brazil and Iran, what Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan correctly described as a "unique opportunity" to finally reach agreement on Iran's civilian nuclear program, were sabotaged the following day when the US announced that a fresh round of sanctions would be launched against Iran's international finances and trade. Brazilian President Lula has leaked correspondence it had with the White House during the negotiations with Iran which illustrate the double-dealing of the Obama administration. The letter's authenticity is undisputed by the White House. It means that the Brazilian and Turkish governments were deliberately mislead into believing that their efforts had support from the US, which apparently had not expected a successful outcome and so moved to nix the deal and then went into full spin mode.

Israel is hell-bent on confrontation with Iran. There is nothing Iran can do to placate this Zionist lust for war. Month after month it meets the steep standards set by the UN Security Council and the IAEA only to find that the bar has been raised further each time thanks to US double-dealing. And all the while Iran's enemies openly admit engaging in clandestine warfare within and around its borders.

As we noted earlier, Obama's Zionist envoy Rahm Emmanuel met with Israeli leaders shortly before the attack on the Gaza Flotilla. His visit may have been a green light in other ways. Despite enormous Israeli pressure throughout the conference, the US made the "unprecedented" move of supporting a UN resolution formally calling on Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to open its nuclear facilities to inspection. We are being led to believe that this was a "resounding slap in the face" for Israel, a "complete surprise" to the Israeli government and betrayal of its decades old pact with the US to keep silent about its nuclear weapons program. With its nuclear weapons now openly acknowledged, Israel responded to the UN resolution that same day by sending three of its German-built Dolphin-class submarines near the Iranian coastline...locked and loaded with nuclear cruise missiles. If Israel's hold over the US government is tightly bound by their joint complicity in 9/11, its control of Germany's past comes a close second: Angela Merkel's government effectively donated the lunatic state 6 of these subs over the past 6 months.

But still we're left wondering: is this US "betrayal" just part of the Zionist melodrama, a performance to mislead the world? While most of the world's governments condemned Israel's assault on the Gaza flotilla, Obama took the opportunity to publicly reassure Israel that its "nuclear interests are guaranteed." Which means that the US will do nothing to actually compel Israel to commit to a nuclear-free Middle East. It will continue to sit on the fence and speak with a forked tongue.

America's complicity in Israel's crimes is clear. Obama feigns ignorance by choosing to believe Israel's nonsense about the flotilla smuggling weapons into Gaza. But not everyone in the US government is content with dancing to Zionism's tune. Over the past few months SOTT has published many interesting revelations made by the editorial team at Veterans Today. It appears that someone or some group within the US considers it a useful outlet through which to leak damning intel on Israel. It's been suggested by Veterans Today's sources that the US was specifically told by Israel that it suspected "missing nukes" were among the Gaza flotilla's cargo. This "missing nukes" story has been circulating for a while now. The argument being put forward is that nukes illegally manufactured (with Israeli assistance) in Apartheid South Africa were slated for decommissioning in the US and UK, but they ended up in Israeli hands via its agents in the international arms market. They have since been used in a game of hide-and-seek to entice the US to deploy its military might to track them down, lest they wind up in the hands of Islamic terrorists willing to use them against US targets. According to this narrative the Bush administration really did believe that it was going into Iraq to pursue Saddam's WMD, only they were not looking for mobile chemical labs as Colin Powell told the UN Security Council, but actual and whole nuclear bombs located somewhere in Iraq. If anyone at the Pentagon really did consider this to be valid intel in its deliberations prior to invading Afghanistan and Iraq, then they have certainly kept remarkably quiet about it. Whether these nukes exist in reality or whether they are part of an ongoing ruse by the Secret Team to induce the US govt to go chase them wherever they are told the nukes have been relocated to, we cannot say. It remains interesting speculation for now.

Rogue Torpedo

We have noted before (scroll down to 'Barking Dog') how trouble between North and South Korea has an amazing ability to flare up at critical junctures in events related to Iran. In late March a South Korean patrol boat sank with all 46 crew members near North Korean waters. At the time the South Korean government was keen to play down reports that its northern neighbour had torpedoed it. Who then was feeding the media these reports? South Korea's intelligence service changed tune a month later and said "human torpedoes" consisting of kamikaze-style North Korean "mini-subs" were responsible. And yet everyone knows the North's military capabilities are dwarfed by its southern neighbour's (thanks to US military aid) and that it would be ludicrous for it to strike first. South Korea is effectively a US protectorate with thousands of US troops stationed there since WWII and the Korean War. Its military might is an extension of American military might; its intelligence-security apparatus is an extension of the same overall imperial military structure designed and built by the US. In short, South Korea is a major Asian garrison of the American Empire. So too is Japan, by the way. Its prime minister has resigned because of tremendous US pressure to maintain its huge fortress on Okinawa.

It is interesting that the South Korean government has been careful to avoid explicitly blaming Kim Jung-Il for the incident, despite its intelligence agency's insinuations pinning the blame for the incident on North Korea. Again we ask, who is behind these reports? An initial investigation of the salvaged torpedo included a chemical and metallic debris analysis of the evidence and concluded that the cause of the explosion which sank the Cheonanwas a torpedo of German construction. As far as we can tell, North Korea doesn't possess any German submarines or torpedoes. Hmmm, German submarines...

Two weeks later a subsequent report was published by the Joint Civilian-Military Investigation Group (JIG), an international research team made up of "military experts" drawn from US, the UK, Australia, and Sweden. Presented to the media as an impartial effort to investigate the raised wreckage and the torpedo, this obscure group, bearing all the hallmarks of a Secret Team disinfo hatchet job, completely contradicted the earlier report and concluded that the salvaged torpedo was a "perfect match" with the CHT-02D torpedo which North Korea allegedly lists on its arms exports brochures. The report stated that, "the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine. There is no other plausible explanation." In fact, as Scott Creighton points out, the torpedoes do not match at all. The culprit torpedo's propeller does not match the North Korean CHT-02D design. Furthermore a South Korean member of the investigation, Shin Sang-cheol, has come forward with his suspicions that the marking "1번" ("Number 1") found on a piece of the torpedo (in an attempt to attribute its ownership to North Korea) was made after it was salvaged. Little wonder then that this second report was unsigned and thus difficult to source; it's a total fabrication made to pin the blame on North Korea and cover the tracks of the true culprit. The Seoul government is now effectively censoring Shin Sang-cheol by putting him under investigation for "spreading false rumors" about the Cheonan incident. Meanwhile the US media has gone to town with the "Evil North Korea" story. But Pyongyang officials vehemently deny the allegations and have asked to see the evidence in order to inspect it themselves but have been denied access.

At the beginning of May, Israeli President Shimon Peres moaned to the press about North Korea selling nuclear technology to its enemies, calling it a 'duty free shop' for arms to Iran. Yet this is precisely what Israel - Shimon Peres included - has been doing for years! Consider all the rogue states that Israel has sold nuclear and conventional weapons technology to down through the decades - even to its own "mortal enemies." Israel is effectively a clearing house for the international arms market. It's not unreasonable to ask whether Israel has passed on a sub or two to North Korea. We are not suggesting that Israel is directly implicated in the recent fun and games on the Korean peninsula, but it sure is damn curious that this geopolitical hotspot is once again active just as the UN Security Council is discussing the possibility of a nuke-free zone for the Middle East and all that this implies for Israeli regional hegemony. Kim Myong Chol writing for the Asia Timesreports that North Korea blames the US for sinking the Cheonan and he makes a strong case for this being a case of 'friendly fire' during the Foal Eagle war game that was taking place between US and South Korean warships in the area at the time. The predictable consequences of this incident has been a round of tit for tat escalation as the two Koreas came close to open confrontation mid-month when South Korea fired warning shots at North Korean ships. Pyongyang reaffirmed that it had nothing to do with the torpedo incident then threatened open war and Seoul responded by cutting off all trade with the North. After being kept on ice by the Secret Team for the past 57 years, they really may be on the brink of war this time.

If the antagonism whipped up in Korea served to distract attention "over there," then the Times Square nearly-terrorist attack was timed to absorb attention on the eve of landmark meetings taking place at the UN HQ nearby. In our March installment we looked at the growing awareness in the US that 9/11 was an inside/outside job, a conspiracy of Zionist pathologicals against humanity. Running counter to that trend was case after case of "suspected domestic terrorists", American citizens framed for "alleged conspiracies" against the US, that culminated in the draconian McCain-Lieberman bill calling for tougher measures to counter these utterly fictitious scenarios churned out by the media.

In the days leading up to the Times Square incident news broke that yet another terrorist bogeyman previously thought to be dead was in fact alive and well and hiding in the hills of northern Pakistan. An official of Pakistan's ISI, "who spoke on condition of anonymity" pronounced that Hakimullah Mehsud had miraculously survived a CIA drone attack in January. Furthermore his people were once more swarming the Swat Valley after Pakistan's army had apparently rinsed them out during an operation in 2009.

On the eve of the incident President Obama was regalling the corporate press at the annual Washington Correspondents Association dinner, cracking jokes about Predator drones, Goldman Sachs and his Nobel prize. Times Square was dramatically evacuated for ten hours the following day after a Vietnam veteran - now a t-shirt vendor apparently - was walking by and noticed a suspicious "smoking" car parked on Broadway. The police later removed three propane tanks, fireworks, two filled 5-gallon gasoline containers, two cheap alarm clocks, electrical wire and a metal cabinet filled with a weak mixture of fertilizer from the back of the Nissan Pathfinder. In fact, it was the wrong kind of fertilizer to be of any explosive use. The fireworks were allegedly traced to Ponocos in Pennsylvania, where they were purchased 8 weeks before. A Ponocos spokesperson said the fireworks consisted of "a fireworks fountain, a tube, fuse and up to eight packages of M-88s, none of which can really do any damage." The alarm clocks were cheap plastic imports. Clearly international terrorism is also feeling the bite of the global recession. That's a long way down from multiple simultaneous hijackings in the most controlled airspace on the planet.

The US media were naturally quick to implicate Muslims, but it is noteworthy that no claim of responsibility had been made before SITE Intelligence, a kind of pseudo intelligence/private investigator run by former IDF soldier Rita Katz, discovered videos purportedly produced by the Pakistani Taliban which claimed responsibility. Hmmm, Rita Katz... the name rings a bell... oh yes, the same Rita Katz who has made it her business to invent phony Muslim terrorists and hystericise America by leaking dubious internet postings, video and audio recordings to the media, all dredged from online hangouts of "radicalised" Muslim misfits fed up with the US and Israel's wars of imperial conquest.

Watching the media attempt to weave this farce into something resembling a coherent narrative would be hilarious if the consequences for all were not so damn serious. The initial narrative went something like this: the vehicle was left outside the offices of media behemoth Viacom. Viacom owns Comedy Central. Comedy Central broadcasts the cartoon series South Park. Its producers had recently spoofed the hysteria generated by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten (when it published a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed) by featuring an episode where Mohammed appears in a bear suit. Last month "Revolution Muslim", a US-based website, posted a diatribe threatening attacks against the South Park creators for this blasphemy. However, it soon became clear that this "motive" for the Times Square terrorist attack - let's call it the Fireworks Fiasco - wouldn't stick for long: "Revolution Muslim" is a known hangout for American Jews that "converted to Islam" and are free to spout hatred while innocent American Muslims are routinely harassed and exported abroad for torture.

Take a good look at this website. It is as close to al Qaeda as any of us will ever be, for it is "al Qaeda", the "database." It is the database of patsies, actors and hapless dupes groomed and/or entrapped to become assets of western intelligence agencies. Chocked full with 'facts', graphs, charts, profiles and terrorist gossip, IntelCenter is another Mossad cutout pretending to diligently keep tabs on the world's evil-doers. In fact, it is the database through which it pulls together bits of data, most of it entirely fictitious and with no basis in reality whatsoever, to concoct endless fantastical scenarios that are then blasted across the airwaves. The most suitable yarn is the one that best fits the current overall narrative. With the Underwear Bomber at Christmas, it was necessary to connect the event with Yemen as US warships were actively razing Houthi rebels' villages to the ground in partnership with the despotic Saudi and Yemeni regimes. In this case, Obama's undeclared dirty war in Pakistan is in dire need of an injection of American righteousness; some tenable justification was required for continuing to blitz Pashtuns with CIA drones.

Once SITE and IntelCenter "discovered" the Pakistani Taliban's claim of responsibility "on an Islamist website" and the suggestion was planted in the public's mind that the source of the Fireworks Fiasco lay in Pakistan, the way was open to introduce the patsy. Faisal Shahzad was arrested two days later in dramatic fashion at JFK airport onboard an Arab Emirates flight bound for Dubai. The FBI raided his home in Connecticut while Pakistani police arrested his friends and family back home. He was apparently tracked down as the owner of the Nissan Pathfinder, which had been purchased with cash three weeks previously. Initially, he "was not considered a suspect." And yet, by the evening of his arrest, the dual Pakistani-American citizen had confessed to being a "lone wolf", on the one hand solely responsible for attempting to set off a fireball in one of the most heavily protected landmarks on US soil, while also vicariously connected with the "Pakistani Taliban." He was charged with attempting to set off a "weapon of mass destruction." Yes, apparently fertilizer and propane tanks now pass for WMD. If Cheney and company had known farm materials could be indexed as WMD, they would have had a field day listing Saddam's vast inventories.

He was on the 'no-fly list', yet was allowed back into the country to return to his home in Connecticut. Well we know how reliable no-fly lists are for screening potential terrorists. The teenaged Underwear Bomber was also on the list and had no passport yet he still waltzed through Israeli-run airport security at Schiphol, Amsterdam (with a little help from his friends). This kind of 'oversight' is simply not credible when we consider the following account of the high-level military intelligence in Shahzad's case. CBS news published a story revealing the Pentagon's Special Ops involvement in arresting the Fireworks Fizzler, then quickly scrubbed it:

In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport. [...]

The Nationpoints out that the two guys running the investigation have deep backgrounds in secret Pentagon "Special Access Programs." [...]

At some point in their investigation, the FBI began following Shahzad, then lost him until he turned up on the Emirates passenger list. It's possible that the planes were used during this time to try to find him. Although the original WCBS account, that planes "intercepted a call to Emirates" doesn't fit with the New York Times' report that authorities didn't know Shahzad was on the flight until that last-minute customs cross-check. [...]

Maybe it was actually a drone? Over at Pajamas Media, Annie Jacobs spoke with a retired NSA source, who told her this:

A retired National Security Agency (NSA) source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says signals intelligence was a key factor in catching Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.

Pentagon 'Special Access Programs' and the NSA? This suggests Shahzad was being watched so closely that they could time his arrest precisely to make it look like he was fleeing the country. The Pentagon's involvement is also a strong marker indicating that this was a Secret Team operation from start to finish. Having shaken down his relatives and friends in Pakistan, authorities there decided there was nothing whatsoever linking Shahzad with "terrorists" in Pakistan. Hilary Clinton promptly catapulted the propaganda by accusing Pakistan of "harboring Bin Laden" - War on Terror codespeak for "if you don't play ball, there will be hell to pay." Her threats were backed up by a third drone attack since the Times Square bomb scare, this time killing 14 "militants."

Much was made of the fact that he had recently returned to the States from a 5 month hiatus in Peshawar, Pakistan, a "hotbed of al Qaeda terrorism" the US media harped. It's actually home to millions of ordinary Pakistanis being terrorised by Blackwater and US-Israeli counter-terrorism units. It's also home to the wealthy Shahzad family. Faisal's father just happens to be Baharul Haq, retired Vice-Marshall of Pakistan's Air Force and deputy director general of the country's civil aviation authority. Now what are the odds that both the Underwear Bomber and the Fireworks Fizzler were both from families whose parents were members of their countries' elites? Nobody's fooling Kifyat Ali, a cousin of Shahzad's father, who said Faisal's detention was "a conspiracy so the (Americans) can bomb more Pashtuns."

Faisal had been living in the US for three years doing financial analysis at a company controlled by Leon Black's private-equity firm, Apollo Management LP. Jeff Gates' research uncovers the narrow degrees of separation connecting Faisal's employer with high crimes on Wall Street. He had a mortgage on a house in Connecticut (the keys to which this dangerous international terrorist left behind in his locked SUV parked on Broadway, along with the keys to the vehicle). His upbringing, employment status, non-existent connection with Pakistani terrorists, the involvement of Pentagon "Special Access Programs" and the NSA in his arrest and the incident's timing on the eve of a conference that would bring Israel's nuclear arsenal into the limelight all adds up to Faisal being a patsy ripe for spinning both ways - as an "asset of the Pakistani Taliban" or as a "homegrown terrorist." Neither scenario fits of course, but don't let that get in the way of a good story. The hysteria it generates feeds the US war machine abroad, revives dormant legislation (the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007) and prolongs Israel's survival at the top of the food chain by reinforcing the War on Terror™ and the "Clash of Civilizations."

Since his arrest Faisal has been neither seen nor photographed, and not a peep has come from him concerning the charges. We have to take everything the US authorities say about him on face value. Did he really confess? Was he tortured beforehand? Like "lone wolf" Fort Hood shooter Major Col. Malik Hasan before him, we'll never know because terrorist investigations are considered exempt from due procedure: secret charges, secret witnesses, secret evidence... they're guilty as framed before they even set foot in a courtroom. Agence France-Presse reported that "Officials said he was cooperating with interrogators, who used a little-known law to delay reading him his Miranda rights." "Little-known" perhaps because it does not exist (or has been secretly added ex post facto to the US Criminal Code). This suggests they didn't read him his rights because they were either looking to ensnare him or 'force' a confession out of him. How convenient that Shahzad "confessed" to being trained in Waziristan, the very region of Northwest Pakistan in which US drones have concentrated their attacks this year. Another drone strike in the province killed at least 6 "militants" the day after the Fireworks Fiasco, taking the death toll there to over 300 this year. Pakistani press accounts estimate civilian deaths alone at more than 600 since the bombing campaign began mid-2008. The kill ratio is set to increase dramatically as the CIA has just been granted approval by the White House to expand its drone program.

Bomb scares and false alarms are a daily occurrence in New York City, but the outbreaks of hysteria there in the days after this hyper-hystericised event bordered on the pathological. A broken-down truck prompted the closure of the Triborough Bridge. Apparently its "abandoned state" meant that it was "mysterious" and could only be demystified once SWAT teams and anti-bomb squads had descended on the scene. Times Square was evacuated twice on May 7 as a "suspicious package was discovered on a sidewalk" that turned out to be a water cooler containing... books and water bottles. Another suspicious package was later confirmed to be... somebody's lunch. In a time when no good crisis - real or imagined - is allowed to go to waste, the New York authorities cashed in by announcing that the city's high-tech surveillance grid would be fast-tracked and expanded to cover the whole of Manhattan.

The invasive nature of full-body scanners and the type of individuals who are using them was illustrated clearly by the arrest of a TSA security guard for beating up a colleague who made fun of him. After Mr Negron walked through one of the new high-tech security scanners during a recent training session a co-worker made fun of his small genitalia. Negron confronted him in an employee parking lot and hit him with a police baton on the arm and back. Parallels have been drawn with the security worker at London's Heathrow Airport who was also given a legal warning for a similar offence. When a female security officer walked through a scanner, the co-worker saw the image and then made lewd comments about her. This immaturity of workers in these positions of responsibility hardly inspires confidence in the general public into accepting these supposed "security measures." It is true that being blasted with X-ray's is quicker than being forced to remove shoes, belts and other personal items but the effect of the over-hyped terror threat to justify increased security has meant that where an alternative exists, less people are choosing to fly. Perhaps restricting air travel is one of the intended consequences, however the primary motives are to tighten monitoring, surveillance, control and to increase the profits of the technology and security companies. As Kevin Mitchell, the chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, an advocacy group, put it: "Security is recession-proof," he said. "It's global and it's growing.".

Since 2006, more than 3,000 "behaviour detection" officers have been stationed at more than 160 airports across the US in order to provide a "hidden measure of security." The team hired to spot terrorists at US airports have failed to catch a single "terrorist" despite costing the taxpayer $200 million last year. The TSA said the sham is a "vital layer of security based on science", but the science says otherwise:

A 2008 report by a team at the National Academy of Sciences said "behavioural surveillance" had "enormous potential for violating privacy" and there was no evidence it worked. The report said a person behaving oddly could just as easily be planning an extramarital affair as a terrorist attack.

Throughout May our 'friends' at Facebook and Google were busy destroying their reputations for respecting privacy. As well as being caught sending users' data to advertisers without consent, Facebook rolled-out new features that were meant to shore up users' privacy. After a meeting they denied happened, Facebook executives backtracked a little. Although "Quit Facebook Day" flopped, their fatal business model is doomed to failure and it won't be too long before alternatives such as the "joindiaspora" project offer Facebook fans an ethical social networking alternative.

Google's sinister hidden motive has been revealed as its "streetview" cars trundle around the streets of Germany, America and the UK, mapping every WiFi wireless router in sight. Every premise using this dangerous device to connect to the Web has been entered into a Google database.

The project was secret until an inquiry in Germany forced Google to admit that it "mistakenly" downloaded emails and other data from unsecured wireless networks that were not password-protected. However, it is now obvious that this was no mistake at all given that a patent Google submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office in November 2008 shows that the search giant purposefully created technology to gather, analyze and use data sent by users over their wireless networks.

The Fireworks Fiasco in Times Square has been used to good fear-based marketing effect in order to increase spending on massive surveillance in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited the home of Orwellian CCTV Big Brother London to check out their surveillance camera system and take "Big Brother Britain" back to New York City. "We live in a world of suicide bombers. We live in a world of international terrorism," Bloomberg said, regurgitating the war on terror propaganda myth. The reality is that we live in a world where leaders tell us to fear international terrorism so they can line the pockets of the surveillance-industrial-complex and clamp down on civil liberties.

Fear is the tool of choice for silencing resistance to surveillance technology and encouraging its proliferation. In the UK the National Health Service is warning of "adverse consequences" if people choose to opt out of its computerised network, which has been criticised as chaotic by doctors. Over 1.25 million patients' information has already gone on to the database, which could eventually hold up to 50 million records. The government acknowledges that the data is not secure and halted the national roll-out after it emerged that data could have been logged on the system without patients' knowledge.

In the US, at the same time that Federal lawmakers push to regulate internet access, the new US Cyber Command ("CYBERCOM") officially became operational, after years of preparation. CYBERCOM intends to start a 'protective' program for civilian networks and to justify its existence, accompanied by alarmist rhetoric about "potential online threats." A chief protagonist is former Bush administration cybersecurity chief Michael McConnell who warned that the United States "is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing."

To win this war it is necessary to siphon lots of public money towards defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton which has racked up more than $400 million in deals since the beginning of April alone. It should therefore be no surprise to learn that "cyber-warrior" Michael McConnell is Booz Allen Hamilton's executive vice president.

On June 25-27 2010, the G8/G20 'leaders' and banksters are meeting in Toronto, Canada to make decisions that will further their policies of exploitation of people and the environment. Canada's Conservative government and police-security establishment have put aside nearly $1 billion to spend on security for the event. They have not ruled out the patently illegal use of provocateurs which they employed in 2007 at a North American leaders' summit in Montebello, Quebec. The line-up will include sound cannons, thousands of police, "free speech zones", recruitment of truck drivers and couriers to spy on demonstrators and 70 new CCTV cameras. As a Toronto Police Accountability Bulletin proclaimed, "In the name of security, the police are being given a very free hand with the city." Paul Franklin proposes a far more sinister reality for the mega-security operation; that authorities "are using next month's summits to refine their techniques and operational capabilities for use in the event of social unrest and to acclimatize the population to police-state type measures."

This month SOTT is awarding the Big Brother award for Orwellian Outlandishness outright to a UK council for giving an elderly woman an £80 on-the-spot fine for the heinous crime of feeding some birds. It is the result of the Orwellian combination of voluntary Neighbourhood Watch groups dishing out justice; to spying on residents and illegal covert camera recording:

Spies record residents who litter then post the footage onto Youtube. Neighbours are then encouraged to name and shame those dropping litter. Footage of people who litter is passed to the local authority who are then able to use it as evidence to issue fines.

This is exactly how the Gestappo operated. The bulk of its work was carried out by zealous citizens. There may be a little glimmer of hope for halting the goose-step of the British police state. The new 'ConDem' coalition government has pledged a Freedom Bill that promises to curb the power of state intrusion by limiting the use of CCTV, DNA databases and other identity registers.

We will believe it when we see it.

Flash-Crash Terrorism

On May 6 the Dow Jones stock exchange index plunged 999 points in less than half an hour, and just as suddenly recovered two-thirds of that loss, in what was one of the most turbulent days in the history of the US stock market. Initial reports blamed it on "fears that Greece's debt problems could halt the global economic recovery", as traders watched Greek protests against their government's austerity measures on their screens. The problem with this explanation is that Greek demonstrations are not new - plus it does not take a genius to figure out that Greece's problems are not over, nor is the global economy out of the woods yet. Surely traders know this. Indeed, hidden in the initial reports we find speculation about the sudden drop being caused "by a trader who mistyped an order to sell a large block of stock". Apparently, the drop in that stock's price was enough to trigger "sell" orders across the market! That would be one big 'oops'.

Yet this explanation too sounds insufficient. Basically we are being told that somewhere along the complex chain of stock trading an unfortunate event took place. In fact, days later a Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) report found "no evidence that these events were triggered by 'fat finger' errors, computer hacking, or terrorist activity, although we cannot completely rule out these possibilities". That leaves us with the obvious scenario; that it was a clear case of market manipulation:

But manipulation by whom? Who was behind the so-called Flash-Crash? In searching for clues, we should ask what else was going on at this time. For one, the Obama administration was pressing the Senate to alter a provision pushed by Senator Bernie Sanders that would have largely repealed a 32-year-old law that protects the Federal Reserve's monetary policy from congressional auditors. The Fed won this match as the Senate yielded under the banksters' pressure and agreed to a compromise.

Notably, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a letter to Congress that the measure would "seriously threaten monetary policy independence, increase inflation fears and market interest rates, and damage economic stability and job creation." A not too veiled threat, perhaps?

As David DeGraw points out, the Fed has pumped nearly $4.3 trillion in bailout funds into the banking system since the beginning of the crisis. Almost nothing is known about where and who that money went to. Sanders' amendment would have finally revealed to the public the full extent of Wall Street's bailout operations.

Later that same day Congress voted and rejected an amendment that would have forced the break-up of the six largest US financial giants into banks that can fail without wrecking the economy, including Goldman Sachs. Since they would no longer be "too big to fail", there would be no longer be any necessity for bailing them out every time they threaten to bring down the economy.

Federal agents have launched parallel criminal and civil probes of JPMorgan Chase and its trading activity in the precious metals market, The Post has learned.

The probes are centering on whether or not JPMorgan, a top derivatives holder in precious metals, acted improperly to depress the price of silver, sources said.

The Commodities Futures Trade Commission is looking into civil charges, and the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division is handling the criminal probe, according to sources, who did not wish to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the information.

Recall last month's story regarding whistle-blower Andrew McGuire, who together with his wife was the victim of a hit-and-run the day after he blew the whistle on insider trading by accurately predicting for the US bullion regulator how market manipulations in the precious metal market would unfold.

Given the threats from lawmakers and authorities to the criminal impunity of the financial terrorists, is it not likely that JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs or any other of their ilk are - yet again - behind this latest financial attack?

Suppose you are a psychopath and you do not want to go down - would you nuke the world to avoid it if you had the means? In this case, Goldman Sachs does have control over the red button. Ellen Brown explains:

Markets can be rigged with computers using high-frequency trading programs (HFT), which now compose 70% of market trading; and Goldman Sachs is the undisputed leader in this new gaming technique. Matt Taibbi maintains that Goldman Sachs has been "engineering every market manipulation since the Great Depression." When Goldman does not get its way, it is in a position to throw a tantrum and crash the market. It can do this with automated market making technologies like the one invented by Max Keiser, which he claims is now being used to turbocharge market manipulation.

Max Keiser summarizes the most likely explanation for the Flash-Crash:

"May 6th was an unequivocal act of domestic financial terrorism in America. A day that will live in infamy.

To scare the lawmakers, themselves large owners of the very banks and stocks that they are supposed to be regulating, a financial Weapon of Mass Destruction was put to their head and they acquiesced.

As the inventor of the continuous double-auction, market-making technology (VST tech. US pat. no. 5950176) that is referenced 132 times by program trading and HFT patents since 1996, I can tell you that Goldman, JP Morgan and the gang simply pulled the 'buys' from their computer trading programs and manufactured a crash. And when the coast was clear, and it was clear the politicians were not going to vote for anything that would break up the 'too big to fail' banks; all the 'sells' were pulled from the computers and the market roared back.

As DeGraw puts it, the United States has been taken over by a financial terrorism network. Not only are they friends of criminals, they are criminals themselves.

But it's not unique to the US. As you probably know, Goldman has been among the Wall Street entities playing 'lets sink the euro' by hitting its 'weakest link', i.e. Greece. Ellen Brown further notes that raking Goldman over the coals before Congress and the SEC in April coincided with another blow to Greece thanks to Standard & Poor's bad credit rating. (Ratings agencies completely in the pocket of Wall Street.) In her own words,

Greece appears to be the sacrificial play in the EU just as Lehman Brothers was in the US, "the hostage the kidnappers shoot to prove they mean business."

Europe's Fight

This takes us to Europe, where it seems that the more bankers face the consequences of their actions, the more the euro gets hit. Another case of 'fat-finger accidents'? Unlikely. The day after Germany's financial regulator did the sensible thing and announced new curbs on financial speculators, shares fell across the continent and the euro hit a four-year low. German chancellor Angela Merkel was alarmed: "Every one of us here can feel that the current crisis of the euro is the greatest challenge that Europe has faced for decades, since the signing of the Treaty of Rome." Apparently speculators did not like German-led moves to slap a ban on "naked short-selling" - the practice of selling shares without owning them, borrowing them, or ensuring that they can be borrowed in the future. Imagine the scandal - not being able to sell something that is not yours to sell! US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and British Finance Minister George Osborne thought this was too harsh on the poor financial gamblers and opposed the ban in the name of the gospel of Free Market, accusing such measures of being "protectionism". This has long been a dirty word in a world dominated by neo-liberal free market ideology, but what it essentially amounts to is protecting economies from predators. "Protectionism" is precisely what the speculators and the banksters engage in to protect their assets and their divine right to behave like social parasites.

The EU and the International Monetary Fund have approved a $1 trillion package to "appease the markets" and thus stop Greece's debt crisis from hemorrhaging the rest of the eurozone. What will really happen is that the money will go to the financial terrorists, while the national welfare states are drained. Not content with punishing Europe for its blasphemy, speculators knocked US stocks too.

While another trillion of the public's money is thrown to the wolves, the people lose out again as their welfare is attacked. Spain has approved a 15 billion euro austerity plan. El Paisobserved that public spending may preserve the country's debt solvency, but it also undermines the chances of recovery which itself causes further loss of confidence. Italy is following the same path as it slashes 24 billion euros from public spending. As Mark Weisbrot explains in the above interview with Amy Goodman, they are deliberately shrinking the European economy by driving down wages and creating unemployment. The unemployment rate for the eurozone officially stands at 10.1% (15.8 million people), but the true figure is probably much higher. This is completely irrational if we look at it from the point of view of rescuing the economy and restoring growth for the benefit of all, but entirely rational from the point of view of liquidating the middle class and breaking their resistance to a new economic order where a tiny international financial elite owns and controls everything. What's more, we are paying the bill for this psychopathic project!

At least Iceland is putting up a decent fight. A parliamentary inquiry last month into the country's 2008 financial crisis laid much of the blame on the former heads of the Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir banks - three of the biggest Icelandic banks - who had taken "inappropriate loans" from their own banks. Since then police have been rounding up a number of top bankers while others face billionaire suits:

Glitnir Bank announces that it has commenced legal action in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against Jon Asgeir Johannesson, formerly its principal shareholder, Larus Welding, previously Glitnir's Chief Executive, Thorsteinn Jonsson, its former Chairman, and other former directors, shareholders and third parties associated with Johannesson, for fraudulently and unlawfully draining more than $2 billion out of the Bank.

Glitnir is also taking action against its former auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), for facilitating and helping to conceal the fraudulent transactions engineered by Johannesson and his associates, which ultimately led to the Bank's collapse in October 2008.

On the other side of the globe, the Australian operators of Goldman Sachs may face legal action as a result of allegations of misleading and deceptive conduct on a series of options contracts. Likewise, Greece may investigate US investment banks and their role in the run-up to the Greek debt crisis. Or so Prime Minister George Papandreou says. We applaud these efforts but doubt it will be so easy to bring any of the fat cats to justice. They are protected by a cohesive system of firewalls designed to keep normal people out. They write the laws and own enough of the judges to do so. It's effectively a global organised crime syndicate whose members ruthlessly compete with each other but which also closes ranks to outsiders - namely, we the people. The US government's website now deems anyone who views this racket in these terms as a "Marxist conspiracy theorist" whose "imagination has run wild":

A quick look at the US gives no reason for optimism at its government's talk of an "economic recovery": over 60% of Americans receiving state unemployment benefits are now paid with federal government funds because more than half the states are officially bankrupt. As a consequence, the governors of California, New York and many other US states are proposing drastic budget cuts for fiscal year 2011, which begins on July 1 2010, including essential services that will affect the entire population, even as spending on the wars breaches the $1 trillion mark. Where is the public outcry? For how much longer will people accept being squeezed into serfdom?

When Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva of Thailand declared a state of emergency in Bangkok and 23 other provinces on April 7, in an attempt to quash growing pressure from opposition supporters seeking the dissolution of parliament and fresh elections within 15 days, he effectively returned power to the country's military junta. Most Red Shirts are urban and rural poor outraged at the two-tier society of the poor versus the wealthy aristocratic "establishment elite" of royalists, military brass, bureaucrats and the educated middle class. Many come from the north and northeast of the country and support the former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in 2006 in a coup d'état, imposed by the (US-trained and equipped) military. The Abhisit-led government took an exceptionally hard-line approach to the uprising. Using the popular, meaningless and emotional rhetoric that the western governments use to quash dissent, it labels Thaksin and his followers as 'terrorists'. But the Red Shirts are not some motley crew of thugs and bandits from the countryside. Whole families took part in the Battle of Bangkok, driven by despair to take matters into their own hands. They brought food and supplies with them and created a carnival atmosphere, defying the curfew and ban on public meetings by encamping themselves in downtown Bangkok. They occupied 5-star hotels and luxury shopping malls - all those status symbols an impoverished country doesn't need.

On April 9 they took back a satellite TV station which the government had shut down because it gave the 'filthy peasants' fair coverage. Thousands of Red Shirts stormed the TV station compound by overrunning an army barricade, successfully vaulting over rolls of barbed wire, then put their TV station back on air. The army responded the following day in the only way armies know how to. A massacre occurred. As we saw earlier with psychopathic Israelis, psychopathic Thais are no different. At least 26 people were killed and a thousand injured when the government sent in soldiers armed with M16 automatic weapons, live ammunition and tanks, to disperse a peaceful and disciplined Red Shirt demonstration.

The draconian censorship measures also included the blocking of scores of websites, community radio stations and the UDD's television station, People's Channel. To "protect national security", Thai authorities have banned four publications linked to an anti-government protest movement. The government declared that it was now illegal for citizens to post any comments or video clips on the Internet about the military crackdown. In spite of this, the Red Shirts were able to organise themselves. Their next target was the Skytrain service, where they caused disruption by occupying the rail stations. They also set up civilian checkpoints to prevent police reinforcements from entering the city center. Eventually hemmed in on all sides by thousands of police and army personnel, the protesters settled in for a long siege, determined and in good spirits. The situation settled for a while until a soldier was shot in the head on April 28. Of course, the government troops immediately stormed the Red Shirts' barricades "in retaliation", but who really killed the soldier? Oops, "friendly fire", claimed the government after evidence emerged that the soldier was killed by one of its own. That they would be willing to murder one of their own in order to justify an assault against unarmed protesters speaks volumes for the mindset of the gormless minions that rule our world.

On May 10 they called for the arrest of Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuba, responsible for launching the crackdown that left 25 people dead. If this single demand was met they would agree to pack up and return home. Instead the military sealed the protesters' main camp and assassinated the Red Shirts' de facto leader. General Khattiya Sawasdiphol, a renegade army general better known as Seh Daeng (Commander Red), had just finished an interview with The Associated Press when he was taken out by a sniper, signaling the government's intention to crush the protesters. 22 people were killed as soldiers began firing live rounds into the crowds. The Red Shirts could only return fire with fireworks and stones, which the media reported as "makeshift rockets" as part of its effort to grossly distort the protesters' means of defending themselves. The government accused the "terrorists" of initiating the violence with guns "stolen from the soldiers." Again, this exact same accusation was levelled at flotilla activists by the psychopathic Israeli government. But there could be no doubting the source of the violence once this footage surfaced of Thai troops picking off Red Shirts with sniper fire:

On May 19 the two-month long Red Shirt protest ended when the Thai army overran their downtown encampment. At least six civilians were killed in the bloody assault, including an Italian journalist. After tanks were brought in to smash the protesters' barricades, the protest leaders decided to turn themselves in. With the government giving no quarter, they chose to avoid further bloodshed and urged their comrades to return home. In exchange for diffusing the situation, the government agreed to let most of the protesters vacate their camp.

Having terrorised its own population into submission the Thai government next issued an arrest warrant for former PM Thaksin on terrorism charges. The fate of the Red Shirt leaders being held in detention remains uncertain. Prime Minister Abhisit has barely survived a no-confidence vote in the country's parliament. Down, but not out, the struggle goes on. Protesters have vowed to return to the streets but with most of their leaders detained or in hiding, it may be some time before they regroup.

If you read our timeline of destruction covering the unfolding ecocide in the Gulf of Mexico, you'll be aware that the oil gushing from the sea floor has already destroyed the livelihoods of whole communities along the southeastern US states, along with untold numbers of birds and sea creatures. Although the wildlife death toll remains relatively modest, well below the tens of thousands of creatures killed after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska, this is only because the Deepwater Horizon rig was 50 miles off the coast and ground zero is 1 km down on the seabed. Weather conditions have been favorable so far and most of the oil has stayed in the open sea. It will be interesting to see what happens when a hurricane churns through the Gulf.

While we are aware that the catalyst for this event was probably a methane gas explosion, there is now overwhelming evidence pointing to criminal negligence on the part of those responsible for this disaster. BP, in tandem with the Obama administration, is playing a PR game it hopes will placate the American people just enough to distract them from the reality that America is a corporate playground where criminals are in charge and no court can stop them. Only sustained pressure from people channelling their frustration towards informing each other of the predators in their midst can curb their indulgences. But first you, America, have got to get mad!

It has emerged the Obama administration intervened last year to support the reversal of a court order that would have halted offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama's Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who has long had close ties to the industry, specifically cited BP's Deepwater Horizon operation as one that should be allowed to go forward. BP has been hit with an avalanche of compensation claims so it has turned to none other than Mr. Halliburton himself and hired a former spokeswoman for former Vice President Dick Cheney to be help "clean up its image" as its shares nosedive in the wake of the oil spill. It's just a drop in the ocean for this corporate behemoth: on June 3 the company went ahead with its $10 billion dividend payout to its conscienceless shareholders "to ease investors' concerns." To hell with the planet's suffering, there's money to be made!

With their livelihood destroyed, fishermen are now being paid good money by BP, ostensibly to help clean up its mess, but really to buy their silence. The same can't be said for the mainly black people they have brought in to clean the beaches: they receive $10 an hour and already payments have been missed. Along with regular clean-up workers, they must sign confidentiality agreements that prevent them from sharing photographs of the dead animals strewn along the shores of the Gulf. New York Daily News journalists were one of many groups escorted away from Elmer Island's wildlife refuge in Louisiana as they tried to document the crime scene. BP is apparently banking on the sea eventually washing away the thousands of dead and dying animals suffering along 125 miles of coastline.

On June 2 BP announced that it would try its seventh method for containing the leak. 'Cut and cap' involves sawing through pipe then placing a containment cap over it that would allow the oil to be channelled to the surface onto a drilling ship. This was attempted in early May but had to be aborted when water leaked inside the cap causing methane hydrates to form. The operation required a clean cut through the wellhead's exit pipe to be successful. But the diamond saw became stuck mid-way through and yet another operation had to be launched, this time to free the saw. The latest development is that the containment cap has been successfully placed over the wellhead allowing some of the oil to be sent up to waiting ships. But vents remain open on the cap to allow the oil to escape because of the tremendous pressure from the gushing oil and the risk that water could leak into the cap and again form hydrates. BP's CEO Tony Hayward has just triumphantly announced that half the oil flow is being recovered, but as SOTT suggested in 'Mother of all Gushers', his joy may be less out of concern for the Gulf environment and more to do with protecting BP's plummeting share value by over-emphasising even the smallest hint of progress. Remember, this is the psychopath that claimed there are actually not any massive plumes of oil spreading deep below the Gulf's waves, asserting that all the oil had risen to the surface. If you compare BP's estimate of 10,000 barrels of oil being captured, over half of the amount leaked daily according to the US government's estimate, to those put forward by independent scientists which estimate anything up to 70,000 barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf each day, it's clear that this latest containment effort is just another public relations exercise to assuage the public's righteous anger. As much as 46 million gallons have already leaked into the Gulf. If this latest "cut and cap" operation fails there could be more than 138 million gallons of oil spilled before a relief well is finished in August. But no one really knows. Bloomberg reported that the well could gush till Christmas. Others think it may do so for years.

As oil begins washing up on Florida's beaches, little is being said about another oil spill in Alaska late May. No prizes for guessing which company is the major shareholder of the Alyeska Pipeline which leaked oil after a "power failure." Meanwhile satellite images have been released which purport to show a second leak in the Gulf of Mexico. We wonder if this is related to the reports of another oil rig that collapsed in early May.

Obama is reassuring Gulf residents that BP will be made to cough up "every dime they owe", but if the Exxon Valdez spill offers a precedent, BP will marshal its army of lawyers to tie up compensation claims in the courts and whittle down its "costs" until it emerges on the other side having paid only a fraction of the true costs. The pathologicals blowing smoke in our eyes about the true scale of the disaster are counting on us forgetting about it by August.

In Baker v. Exxon, an Anchorage jury awarded $287 million for actual damages and $5 billion for punitive damages, but after nineteen years of appellate jurisprudence, the Supreme Court on June 25, 2008 issued a ruling reducing the punitive damages to $507.5 million, roughly a tenth of the original jury's award. Furthermore, even that amount was reduced further by nineteen years of inflation. By that time, many of the people who would have been compensated by these funds had died.

From urging a boycott of BP, people are now calling for the clean-up operation to be taken over outright by the US government and for BP's assets to be seized. Rightly so; how can the perpetrator be expected to honestly assess its crime and then take care of the crime scene? Obama's posturing is laid bare by the fact that he knew from day one that the Deepwater explosion would result in a never-seen-before environmental catastrophe. This means that the White House was aware of the environmental challenge long before it decided to demonstrate concern via presidential visits to the Gulf:

Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama at one of the earliest briefings in late April that the blowout would likely lead to an unprecedented environmental disaster, senior White House aides told The Daily Beast. Browner warned that capping a well at such depths had never been done before, and that they ought to expect an oil spill that would continue until a relief well was drilled in August, the aide said.

It's important to bear in mind that this oil spill is dwarfed by others that remain off the radar for most. The Niger Delta has seen more oil leaked into its once delicate ecosystem than the Gulf of Mexico. The only compensation Shell PLC awarded the local Ogoni people arrived in the form of violent suppression of its protests and the murder of its activists.

When we received this report about Goldman Sachs making "a substantial financial bet against the Gulf of Mexico" one day before the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, we initially thought it was a serious claim. Then it was pointed out to us that it was a joke, a piece of satire written to... what? make light of the situation? As other outlets were carrying this under "comedy", we followed suit. But it's worth pondering once more in light of the news that BP's psychopathic CEO sold £1.4 million of his shares in BP just weeks before the incident, which means that "he avoided losing more than £423,000 when BP's share price plunged after the oil spill began six weeks ago." He was undoubtedly aware of the red flags going off on the oil rig in the run up to the explosion. The pressure to ignore technicians' safety concerns and cut corners would have come down from him. Shouldn't this man be under arrest for manslaughter or second-degree murder, at the very least? Why is this "little Eichmann" still overseeing this monumental crime?

Those who carry out this global genocide - men like BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume'' - are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications.

Heavens Opening

A near perfect circle in the ground opens up in Guatemala City following heavy rain during Tropical Storm Agatha

Summer may have arrived in the northern hemisphere, but winter's grip still haunts some parts of the globe. The late winter snowfalls in the mountains of California have left a snowpack 2 to 4 times greater than normal due to below-average spring temperatures, delaying growing season in the valleys by almost a month. The central plains of Canada surprised everyone by escaping the frigid winter, but late snowfalls in May in Ontario and Alberta have also delayed the growing season there. Combined with record rainfall, the cool temperatures in Saskatchewan could leave over a million acres unplanted this year. In Europe Paris clocked a record cold temperature of 7.6C on May 11, while central Sweden recorded its longest continuous period of snow cover in the region for at least 60 years as snowpack remains thick going into June and ski slopes are still open in Scotland as 4 inches of snow fell in late May. In central Asia an "unprecedented" snowstorm in Pakistan killed over 10,000 livestock, joining the 8.2 million animals, a fifth of Mongolia's total total livestock, that perished in the longest winter there for decades. Further east, a record low of 1.7C was recorded in early June in South Korea.

Flooding hit many countries in May, some of it fairly seasonal, but much of it very unusual. More prone to drought at this time of year, Kenya was drenched mid-month with downpours that left over 100 people dead. A landslide on the slopes of Nyiragongo Volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed at least 46 people and washed away more than 200 houses. Tropical storm Agatha in central America caused sudden flooding and landslides that left over 200 people dead, most of those casualties in Guatemala, where it rained so hard that the ground gave way in a suburb of Guatemala City to leave a bizarre sinkhole that swallowed a house and a three-storey building. The northern Indian Ocean cyclone season got off to a roaring start with 3 cyclones pounding the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Cyclone Phet killed 12 people in Oman before it barreled eastwards towards Pakistan and killed 7 more in Pakistan, flooding the city of Karachi. At least 51 people were killed and around 2 million affected in landslides and floods triggered by more heavy rain in the Guangxi Zhuang region of south China late May. Tornadoes and thunderstorms have drenched the Carolinas and turned parts of the American Midwest into "a war zone", claiming 5 people's lives early June, while another 4 were killed during an outbreak of tornadoes in Oklahoma early May. Check out this video of a monster hail storm pounding Oklahoma City on May 16:

A heatwave in northern India this month has left hundreds of people dead along with untold numbers of animals as temperatures approached a staggering 50C in Gujarat on the country's west coast. Meanwhile Myanmar to the east suffered similar baking temperatures which killed hundreds more people. The region has been sweltering with one of the hottest summers since records began. As this local heatwave so clearly bucks the overall trend being observed of cooling global temperatures, we suspect that a local heat source is contributing to these high temperatures. In fact, one suspect is an enormous hydrothermal "megaplume" from an underwater volcanic hotspot found in the Indian Ocean 5 years ago. It is emitting gasses and mineral-enriched water as hot as 760°F (400°C) and is "at least 10 times - or possibly 20 times - bigger than anything of its kind that's been seen before." Bramley Murton of the British National Oceanography Centre says that, "A normal hydrothermal vent might produce something like 500 megawatts, while this is producing 100,000 megawatts. It's like an atom bomb down there." Now contrast this with the "unprecedented snowstorm" in the Kishtwar district of the disputed territory of Jammu in northern India on June 1. At least 25 were killed with many more still missing along with their livestock. Although this region is at significantly higher altitudes than the coastal plans of Gujarart, it is normal for this region to experience temperatures of 30C at this time of year.

Where is all this excessive precipitation coming from? Our hypothesis that underwater volcanic eruptions are heating the oceans and thus evaporating off more moisture into the atmosphere is supported by an array of spectacular volcanic activity this month. Most of the following reports cover volcanoes on land, but remember that the vast majority of volcanoes are below water. Scientists generally appreciate that we really know very little about the extent of what takes place activity in the deep oceans. Something to consider in light of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion: it exploded right after workers "introduced heat to set the cement seal around the wellhead." Some combination of reckless consideration for safety protocol and pressure from their superiors to "drill, baby, drill" meant they were unaware that methane hydrates had collected inside the wellhead, reverted to gas form when heat was applied to seal the wellhead, then shot up the drill column as an expanding bubble of methane gas before exploding at the platform on the ocean's surface. Methane exists in vast quantities under the Earth's surface in clathrate and hydrate form. We are receiving reports of this gas coming to the surface all the time. Just before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, a methane gas leak at another oil well forced hundreds to evacuate from their homes in Louisiana. In the last month alone, there have been threedeadlyexplosions at mines around the world caused by methane outgassing from below ground.

Methane outgassing is also the prime suspect for otherwise unexplainable explosions and leaves a distinct smell over a wide area as it comes to the surface and expands. If there is a significant "greenhouse gas", methane is it. Methane is strongly correlated with climate change events in the past:

James Kennett, a geologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who discovered evidence of the 55-million-year-old extinction event, warns that "the melting and release of methane hydrate on a global scale is the right mechanism to propel climate change," he says. "It happens very fast geologically over a few decades. But the climate fluctuations in the last few thousand years are small compared to the big events 55 million years ago."

The fact of the matter is that "big events" are not limited to millions upon millions of years ago. Catastrophic climate change from cometary bombardment on a global scale took place as recently as 13,000 years ago. Regional catastrophism took place as recently as 1,500 years ago. These scientists are not asking the right questions.

What if the release of methane from below the oceans is part of the mechanism to propel climate change but is not the causal factor of this mechanism? Readers of SOTT will be aware that we suggest a cosmic catalyst is responsible for periodically opening up the planet's surface. Where methane does not naturally outgas, energy companies help it on its way out by drilling ever deeper for oil and gas. Oil and gas wells are really dangerous places to be these days. Another fatal accident was narrowly avoided when a gas blowout at a 'fracking' well in Pennsylvania backfired natural gas and 'frack fluid' 75 feet into the air on June 3. As we go to press yet another methane explosion has been reported at a gas well in West Virginia, burning 7 workers.

Related to this issue are the continuous discoveries of underwater volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. In late April scientists were excited to announce the discovery of a cluster of asphalt volcanoes off the Californian coast. As it turns out, a similar discovery was made in the Gulf of Mexico several years ago. Somewhat ironically, researchers had been scouring the Gulf, prospecting for methane at the sea floor. The little Eichmanns at the energy companies intend to turn a profit from this highly volatile gas. They found vast quantities of it, along with these volcanoes. There was a suggestion that BP had actually drilled their well into one of these volcanoes. Supporting our hypothesis that the Earth's rotation is slowing down is the fact that the planet's magnetic field is fading. This is undoubtedly connected to recent observations that the Earth's mantle is flowing an incredible 20-30 times faster than previously thought.

That impossible-to-pronounce volcano in Iceland has calmed down, but its next-door-neighbour is trembling so much that Iceland's government has issued a warning to Europeans to expect more disruption from Katla's anticipated eruption. At least it will be easier for travellers to curse this volcano. Not that Eyjafjallajokull had anything to do with cancelled flights. In fact, seismic activity beneath Iceland's many volcanoes hints that several of them are ready to blow. Two volcanoes erupted on the same weekend late May in the Bering Strait, the Bezymianny volcano on the Russian side and the Cleveland volcano in the chain of Aleutian islands. A big ash cloud covering more than 4580 square miles could (apparently) threaten air travel. Further south observers are warning that Mount Baekdu, a dormant volcano on the border between North Korea and China, is showing signs of a possible eruption in the near future, while there was another strong quake off the The Ryukyu Islands in Japan on May 26.

In the southern Pacific a strong earthquake clocking 7.2 on the Richter scale followed by an aftershock of 6.4 struck Vanuatu on the same day. This was followed by a further eruption of Mount Yasur volcano on May 31 at the country's southernmost island. Mount Yasur is only teasing for the moment, but has been raised to alert level as it threatens "the big one" at any moment. May 31 was an active day for the region as an underwater volcano off Sarigan Island near the Pacific's Northern Mariana Islands shot clouds of ash and vapor nearly eight miles into the sky and two strong quakes hit the Andaman Islands and the Philippines. Earlier in May another 7.2 quake struck off northern Sumatra in Indonesia, followed a week later by multiple eruptions of Mount Baru Jari on Lombok Island, near Bali, which spewed ash and lava 1,500 to 2,000 meters high.

The western hemisphere is also rocking and rolling. On successive days late May two huge eruptions occurred in Ecuador and Guatemala. Both eruptions were preceded by Costa Rica's Arenal volcano on May 24, where a strong earthquake also struck the following week. Three other noteworthy quakes were recorded in Puerto Rico, Peru and Brazil throughout the month. Tungurahua Volcano in Ecuador has been steadily increasing in activity since 1999. Its eruption on May 27 is the largest in the world so far for 2010, sending out a 7km-long ash plume that spread ash over nearby towns. The Pacaya volcano in Guatemala lies just 15 kms south of the country's capital so its eruption May 28 caused much disruption as a layer of black ash 3 inches thick blanketed the city's southern districts and forced the closure of its international airport. Thousands of residents near the volcano had to evacuate and there was at least one casualty. Television reporter Anibal Archila was tragically killed by a shower of burning rocks when he got too close to the volcano. He was standing in front of a lava river and burning trees, in mid-broadcast for a local television station, telling viewers how intense the heat was. Given that these simultaneous volcanic eruptions occurred in the same region at the same time and that both were larger than the eruption in Iceland which downed flights for a week in April, we should expect that similar measures applied in central America. Nope, all the Associated Press had to say about this was: "Neither of the eruptions was expected to disrupt airports in neighboring countries like Iceland's Eyjafjallajokul volcano did in Europe." Why? Because Latin American ash is apparently "different" to European ash. Of course! European volcanic ash is "lighter", so it supposedly hangs around in the sky longer. Nonsense: the European ash cloud was invisible because it was fictional. The PTB clearly don't care about closing air traffic in the western hemisphere.

With man-made global warming thoroughly discredited it was heartening to hear the Royal Society announce that it is to review its public statements on climate change. However, as The Telegraphpoints out,

This development does not, of course, mean that the Royal Society is embracing climate scepticism. On the contrary, it is very reluctantly modifying its stance to accommodate some of its Fellows who take the very scientific position that a degree of agnosticism is good practice when hypotheses remain unproven. Yet this retreat from absolutist global warming orthodoxy will deeply dismay the AGW lobby. For years, there was no fiercer proponent of the AGW theory than the Royal Society. Its previous president Lord May notoriously stated: "The debate on climate change is over."

Two prominent voices on climate change spoke up in favour of global cooling at the 4th International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago this month. Dr. Don Easterbrook, a US geologist, told the conference that whatever global warming took place in the past decade has ended and we can now expect rapid cooling "for the next 2-3 decades that will be far more damaging than global warming would have been." Meanwhile Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, has predicted, based on the correlation of sunspot activity to global temperatures, that the next ice age could begin in 2014. We're not holding our breath waiting for someone to publicise what seems so flaming obvious to us: that cometary interaction with the inner solar system is the catalyst for the observed changes in solar and climate activity.

Speaking of which, things are brewing up a storm in space too. NASA's 'cosmic weather' monitoring station, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) scans the sky from its polar orbit. Its infrared vision is finding more and more asteroids and comets. As of May 24, 2010, WISE has seen more than 60,000 asteroids. It has observed more than 70 comets, 12 of which are new, and about 200 near-Earth objects, more than 50 of which are new. At least, that is as much as NASA is willing to publish. Based on the frequent reports we receive of incoming fireballs and meteors, the numbers are probably a lot higher. A spectacular fireball woke up residents from Wisconsin to Maryland in the US in the early morning of May 10. The "bright orange and green light moved slowly" across the skies "with pieces breaking off and burning off." Two days later a meteor was spotted travelling in the opposite direction, streaking across the sky over British Columbia and Alberta. Eyewitnesses described "fast streaks of light half-a-second long in duration" preceding the main event which "was very bright and moved somewhat slowly across the sky" before breaking apart into many small pieces. "It was absolutely amazing. It was like something out of the movie Armageddon." On the night of May 16 an "extremely slow" meteor, "not associated with any known shower", was photographed above Colorado. Two days later NASA cameras at the Marshall Space Flight Center and Walker County Science Center near Chickamauga, Georgia, tracked the entry of a large meteor estimated over northeastern Alabama. Despite there being no reports of thunderstorms in the area, residents in Pennsylvania reported an "explosive big boom" that shook homes on the night of May 22. It was later attributed to a meteorite that impacted a cornfield and left behind scorch marks. On May 26 a very bright meteor exploded over El Paso, Texas, while another slow-moving fireball over Canada wowed onlookers at sunset that same day.

If cometary debris is the catalyst for climate change on Earth, then we should also expect to observe it on other planets in the solar system. Astronomers noticed a storm brewing on Saturn in March which this month has become a clearly visible spot. But what is even bigger news is that Jupiter has 'lost' one of its 'belts', bands of 'clouds' composed of ammonia ice crystals, believed responsible for giving the giant planet its curious red, brown and yellow tints. Something has caused the South Equatorial Belt (SEB) to fade away leaving just the north belt (NEB) visible. Australian astronomer Anthony Wesley was among the first to notice the storm on Saturn in March. He has an incredible record with observing celestial events. Last July he alerted observatories to the presence of a large, black spot near Jupiter's south pole, the remains of ash left behind following the impact of a comet or asteroid. According to a paper published this month by the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain, "the main spot, a very black cloud comprising the waste materials produced by the impact, reached a size of about 5,000 km in the atmosphere of Jupiter, even though it was surrounded by a halo caused by the falling of the material expelled from the atmosphere of up to 8,000 km, slightly smaller than the size of the Earth." The size of the comet/asteroid would have been in the region of 500 meters to cause this kind of damage. Wesley did it again this month, along with Christopher Go of the Philippines, who were both observing Jupiter at the lucky moment to capture another impact. This one was smaller than last year's as it "doesn't seem to have left any mark, so it probably burned up in the upper atmosphere before it reached the cloud deck," suggests Wesley. Nonetheless, as Sean Walker points out, "The flare may have looked small from Earth, but it must have been titanic to be seen at all from Jupiter's distance - and on Jupiter's daylit side."

Objective Reality Left and Right

Our world is dying. We have poisoned the air, stained the rivers and wasted the land. While it's true that some are more responsible than others, as the hero V says in V for Vendetta, if you want to know the truth you need only look into a mirror. Now that you know about psychopaths and their biological purpose to destroy all creation, you are likely asking yourself, "What can I do about it?" It's not your fault that machines have taken control of our planet, you were unaware of their existence, although you always suspected something was not quite right. We were born slaves and grew up believing that we were free. In a sense, we are free. We are free to choose. Every moment of every day. We can continue to indulge the illusion of reality programmed into us by our upbringing, our education and our governments. Or we can choose to acknowledge the signs that are screaming at us to understand that there is no hope to be found in our misplaced trust in the old ways of thinking, the old ways of doing. As above, so below. As the planet opens up, so are we. Some are so terrified of loosening their grip on the old ways that they prefer annihilation to change. Witness the extraordinary spike in knife stabbings in early May. Much of this violent and bizarre behaviour came from people who had previously shown no signs of being capable of such deeds. Yet something in them demands sleep at all costs.

Something wicked this way comes. How we emerge on the other side depends on our ability to see what is happening around us. For those of us who embrace change and face the unknown, the hope in our hearts will be multiplied by our actions towards helping others in this dark hour. Our strength is in our community. Alone we will perish, but together we can achieve anything.

it seems to me connecting my won dots together, that something is being planned and even more worrying something is expected. I do suggest watching Ed dames video 'killshot' which is most thought provoking. seeing all the satellites in orbit looking in the infrared, one does wonder of they are looking out for something cometary, long expected by the elite and military..
whilst I have a very open mind and rely only on data that has the look of truth, one has to ask, are we to expect some cataclysmic event? why the seed banks, why the DUMB's of the military? Why was the Vatican library moved to colorado i think it was?
the best way to control a population in time of trouble is to harass them and corall them then to use martial law and such to control them even more.
a slide into poverty prevents mas movement and creates a sense of depression in their minds. if the environment is degenerate, thus makes it even worse.
so, why re so many things coming together now? look at all the earthquakes, and volcanism, and bear in mind the electric model of the universe that is a plasm universe where the solar system does have a negative charge? I believe-- refer to James Maccannys work for this data .
so, connecting these dots, I do believe something nasty is coming our way. Alan and Delairs excellent book says what happend eleven thousand years ago, though other cycles happened since then notably 3600 years back.
Are we in for the same event now I wonder? are so many so deluded such as John Moore, Bill Deagle Ed Dames Marshal Masters, ? or are they part of the same deception? I doubt it.

Has anyone noticed the strange form of the graph at GCPDOT . COM ??? I noticed only some days ago. It looks markedly different from before, always meandering at the upper part of the graph with periodical needles to the downside.